Historians of the Cold War have produced an important corpus of work investigating how the United States cultivated working relationships with anticommunist but illiberal regimes.Footnote ¹ This historiography suggests an approach to understanding the involvement of John F. Kennedy's administration with the Arab Baʿth Socialist Party's first regime in Iraq, which lasted from 8 February 1963 until its overthrow by Iraqi army officers on 18 November of the same year. Prior to its seizure of power, the Iraqi branch of the trans-state, Pan-Arab Baʿth Party was a clandestine organization of primarily young, educated civilians and a much smaller military element. With fewer than 1,000 full members and a narrow base of popular support, the party was able to achieve and maintain power only with the backing of non-Baʿthist army officers. The Baʿthists’ most important link to the Iraqi army was through a retired Nasirist officer, ʿAbd al-Salam ʿArif. The Baʿthists therefore permitted him to serve as president and as nominal head of state. Another former officer, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr—a Baʿthist—served as prime minister. Both were members of the secret National Council of the Revolutionary Command, which exercised ultimate authority over the government and was dominated by Baʿthists. In a war against Kurdish insurgents and a campaign to deracinate the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), the regime resorted to a level of violence and intrusiveness that was extraordinary by the standards of previous Iraqi governments.Footnote ²

Archival sources on the U.S. relationship with this regime are highly restricted. Many records of the Central Intelligence Agency's operations and the Department of Defense from this period remain classified, and some declassified records have not been transferred to the National Archives or cataloged.Footnote ³ The U.S. involvement with the first Iraqi Baʿthist regime therefore must be reconstructed largely from National Security Council and Department of State records. Even among these, a significant number of documents have been classified or otherwise restricted. Nonetheless, the available archival sources, supplemented by memoirs, Iraqi government publications, and the Iraqi press, make it possible to recover important aspects of the Kennedy administration's policies toward the Baʿthist regime.

Kennedy administration officials viewed the Iraqi Baʿth Party as a modernizing—even democratizing—anticommunist movement. They regarded the Baʿthists’ ascent to power as generally favorable to American strategic interests and to Iraq's development. Administration officials had adopted a paradigm of development that posited that recently decolonized countries could eventually achieve high-consumption economies with democratic governments. American policymakers considered that developmental path to be threatened most immediately by indigenous communist movements and by political disorder that communists could exploit. Understanding these threats as “problems of development,” the Kennedy administration refined a policy response called “counterinsurgency.” Administration officials viewed the Iraqi Baʿth Party in 1963 as an agent of counterinsurgency directed against Iraqi communists, and they cultivated supportive relationships with Baʿthist officials, police commanders, and members of the Baʿth Party militia. The American relationship with militia members and senior police commanders had begun even before the February coup, and Baʿthist police commanders involved in the coup had been trained in the United States. Kennedy administration officials became aware that the regime, in its efforts to crush the ICP, detained thousands of Iraqis without trial and summarily executed some of them. U.S. officials also had good reason to believe that the Baʿthists regularly tortured detainees. In the application of counterinsurgency policy, the Americans were uninterested in reports of the regime's human rights violations and were even protective of it.

MODERNIZATION AND COUNTERINSURGENCY

There is a consensus in the literature on the Kennedy administration that its foreign policy was influenced by an intellectual construct that came to be called modernization theory.Footnote ⁴ It is best understood as an ideology or a discourse rather than as a unified theory, and recent scholarship illustrates cases in which policymakers sharply disagreed over its application.Footnote ⁵ Nonetheless, it can be said that a set of overlapping conceptualizations of historical progress, state-building, social psychology, and industrialization constituted the dominant paradigm for the administration's policy toward the developing world. The paradigm's features are well known: it operated on an analytical dyad that opposed the condition of tradition against that of modernity; it portrayed history as a replicable, unilinear, evolutionary process by which societies (nation–states) became modern; and it equated modernity with an idealized industrial, high-consumption, democratic America.Footnote ⁶

Modernization theory was an intellectual and cultural dimension of the American project of containing communism. Theorists and practitioners of modernization proposed that the United States support and accelerate the economic and administrative transformation of Third World states to prevent the radicalization of their lower classes and to compete with Moscow's vision of development. This policy was exemplified in the Kennedy administration's program of development aid for Latin America, the Alliance for Progress. Administration officials sought to support what the historian Nils Gilman has called “the right kind of revolution”—a modernizing, noncommunist revolution led by a liberal middle class.Footnote ⁷ Kennedy's special assistant, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., described the goal as a “middle-class revolution where the processes of economic modernization carry the new urban middle class into power and produce along with it, such necessities of modern technical society as constitutional government, honest public administration, a rational land system, an efficient system of taxation, mass education, social mobility, etc.” He warned that “if the possessing classes of Latin America make the middle-class revolution impossible, they will make a ‘workers-and-peasants’ revolution inevitable. . . .”Footnote ⁸

Such middle-class, noncommunist revolutions seemed immediately threatened by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's January 1961 declaration of support for wars of national liberation such as those under way in Laos and Vietnam and recently completed in Cuba. The Kennedy administration responded by undertaking to secure modernizing governments against communist-supported insurgencies. Creating a collection of policies under the rubric of counterinsurgency, the administration financed, trained, and equipped the regular armies, paramilitaries, intelligence agencies, and police of developing states. To aid them in conducting counterinsurgency, Kennedy ordered the expansion of the U.S. Army Special Forces and the opening of the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Counterinsurgency, in short, entailed U.S. support for developing states in strengthening their repressive capacities.Footnote ⁹

The economic historian Walt Rostow, who entered the Kennedy administration as special assistant to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, was especially responsible for introducing the idiom of modernization theory into the administration's articulation of its Cold War strategies.Footnote ¹⁰ In his 1960 book The Stages of Economic Growth, Rostow had described communism as “a kind of disease which can befall a transitional [i.e., developing] society if it fails to organize effectively those elements within it which are prepared to get on with the business of modernization.”Footnote ¹¹ Rostow understood counterinsurgency as an aspect of managing the business of modernization and was one of the administration's most vocal advocates of counterinsurgency policies, particularly for South Vietnam.Footnote ¹² Addressing the graduating class of the U.S. Army Special Warfare School in 1961, he described a “great revolutionary process that is going forward in the southern half of the world.” There, “Old societies are changing their ways in order to create and maintain a national personality . . . and to bring to their peoples the benefits modern technology can offer.” He warned, “Like all revolutions, the revolution of modernity is disturbing,” producing social dislocation and undermining traditional sources of authority. Thus, communists —“scavengers of the modernization process”—“believe that the weak transitional governments that one is likely to find during this modernization process are highly vulnerable to subversion and guerrilla warfare.”Footnote ¹³

Rostow's identification of the causes of insurgency with crises of modernization was consonant with an influential 1956 study of communist guerrillas in Malaya by his former colleague at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lucian Pye.Footnote ¹⁴ By the beginning of the 1960s, Pye and other prominent modernization theorists such as Daniel Lerner proposed that militaries in the developing world, which were then asserting themselves into politics, were potential agents of modernization as well as guardians of order. These social scientists accepted that the United States might have to work with authoritarian regimes as their societies passed through a fragile transition, after which democracy could emerge.Footnote ¹⁵ Rostow declared to the soldiers at Fort Bragg, “We are dedicated to the proposition that this revolutionary process of modernization shall be permitted to go forward in independence, with increasing degrees of human freedom. . . . Thus our central task in the underdeveloped areas . . . is to protect the independence of the revolutionary process now going forward.”Footnote ¹⁶

To instruct U.S. civilian officials in counterinsurgency techniques, Kennedy ordered the establishment of the Interdepartmental Seminar on the Problems of Development and Internal Defense, a five-week course at the Foreign Service Institute.Footnote ¹⁷ Opening in June 1962, the seminar was taught by the luminaries of development theory and counter-subversion, including Rostow, Pye, and the State Department's Roger Hilsman, a veteran of guerrilla warfare against the Japanese army in Burma.Footnote ¹⁸ Earlier that year, Kennedy had created an interdepartmental working group called the Special Group Counterinsurgency, usually designated “Special Group (CI).” He tasked it with overseeing and coordinating all counterinsurgency programs of the armed services and civilian government agencies operating abroad. The Special Group (CI) developed a counterinsurgency doctrine in a document titled “United States Overseas Internal Defense Policy (OIDP),” which Kennedy authorized in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 182 of August 1962.Footnote ¹⁹

The OIDP exemplified the discourse of modernization. It explained subversion and rebellion as consequences of “a social and economic revolution” in the Third World: “While the institutions required for modernization are . . . being created, this revolution contributes to arousing pressures, anxieties, and hopes which seem to justify violent action.” Therefore, in addition to supporting economic and social development, the U.S. was “to assist in the establishment or strengthening of [foreign] intelligence and internal security organizations” and “to defeat subversive insurgency in countries threatened by assisting the government under attack with military and non-military means. . . .” The OIDP assigned to the chief of mission (ambassador or chargé d'affaires) in each country “the coordination of all U.S. [counterinsurgency] programs” and the development of an internal defense plan in cooperation with the Special Group (CI) in Washington.Footnote ²⁰ Charles Maechling, a State Department assistant to the group who helped draft the program, recalled much later, “Notably absent in the OIDP was any mention of human rights. . . . Despite the barbaric record of Third World security forces, State's repeated efforts to include human rights were rejected.”Footnote ²¹

It is significant for U.S. policy on Iraq that the OIDP mandated that the United States “[s]trengthen the capability of police and paramilitary organizations to counter communist inspired or exploited subversion and insurgency.”Footnote ²² In June 1961, President Kennedy had issued NSAM 56, which called for the Defense Department, in conjunction with the CIA, to “consider various areas in the world where the implementation of our policy may require indigenous paramilitary forces, and thus arrive at a determination of the goals which we should set in this field.”Footnote ²³ The Special Group (CI) began discussion of the Defense Department's assessment in May 1962, and the CIA began a phased handover of its primary responsibility for covert paramilitary operations to the Defense Department two months before the Iraqi Baʿthist coup.Footnote ²⁴

THE IRAQI BAʿTHISTS’ ASCENT TO POWER

When Kennedy came to office, Iraq appeared to be moving down the wrong path of modernization. Since the revolution of 1958, the country had been under the dictatorship of Brigadier ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim.Footnote ²⁵ He was no communist, but until late 1959 he permitted the ICP to have unprecedented influence over the government and government-sponsored associations.Footnote ²⁶ Although he had greatly limited the party's freedom of action by the time Kennedy came to office, Qasim continued to challenge the Anglo-American order in the Persian Gulf. In June 1961, he initiated a crisis by claiming that Kuwait was a province of Iraq. At the end of the year, he confiscated the unused concession area of the Iraq Petroleum Company, a foreign consortium dominated by British and American oil companies. Especially after the Soviet Union vetoed Kuwait's admission into the United Nations, it appeared that Qasim was moving Iraq “increasingly toward the Soviet bloc in the conduct of [its] political and economic affairs, and in its propaganda.”Footnote ²⁷ There were some 1,200 Soviet military and technical advisers in Iraq at the end of 1962.Footnote ²⁸ Kennedy administration officials therefore welcomed the coup of 8 February 1963.

Baʿthist and Arab nationalist student protests at Baghdad University in late December 1962 arguably constituted the coup's first stage. After Qasim purged a number of suspect officers from the army in early February, opposition air force and army officers seized Baghdad's main radio station and key military bases on the morning of 8 February and then attacked Qasim's headquarters at the Ministry of Defense. He capitulated less than twenty-four hours later and was quickly executed with three of his aides. Communists and Qasim's supporters fought tenaciously in a few sections of Baghdad and Basra, but rebel army and police units and a Baʿth Party militia suppressed most resistance by 12 February.Footnote ²⁹ Before the fighting had even ceased, the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Baghdad, Roy Melbourne, reported that “in [Iraq], where deductive reasoning [is] much more popular than inductive, conclusion that [the] U.S. [is] somehow behind this coup has wide currency and communists [are] already trying to use this to charge new government is [a] U.S. stooge.”Footnote ³⁰

This article does not assess the extent of American involvement in the coup, but it is relevant that U.S. officials anticipated it, although they do not seem to have known precisely when it would occur.Footnote ³¹ On the eve of the coup, Melbourne noted the forced retirements of the officers and observed, “With Baʿthi-nationalist capabilities thus reduced prospects for successful anti-Qasim army coup in near future [are] substantially reduced.”Footnote ³² Yet, a set of undated State Department biographical profiles of Baʿthists produced prior to 20 December 1962 indicates that American officials had anticipated a Baʿthist seizure of power on that date and were aware of the party's earlier plans for coups in November 1961 and July 1962. The documents further establish that American officials had been informed of the intended membership of the Baʿth-dominated cabinet prior to the party's seizure of power.Footnote ³³ U.S. intelligence also learned the membership of the secret National Council of the Revolutionary Command before the coup. Roger Hilsman, reporting for the State Department's Bureau for Intelligence and Research (INR), wrote on 20 February, “If the membership remains what it was before the coup, the NCRC includes seven Ministers. . . .”Footnote ³⁴

Administration officials perceived that the new regime in Baghdad changed the balance of power in the Middle East—to the benefit of the United States—both at the level of U.S.–Soviet rivalry and at the level of inter-Arab relations. Further, they considered the Baʿth Party not only an agent of controlled, noncommunist revolution but also a proponent of liberal government. The U.S. government's closest Arab assets at the time were the Saudi and Hashimite Jordanian monarchies. The Kennedy administration also pursued a rapprochement with the regime of President Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir in the United Arab Republic (UAR). Although threatening to the monarchies, al-Nasir's regime exemplified the type of middle-class, noncommunist revolution that the Kennedy administration could support; al-Nasir in fact had Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth translated into Arabic.Footnote ³⁵ Despite the administration's efforts to cultivate good relations with al-Nasir, the war that he was then waging against Saudi-backed royalists in Yemen threatened to force the United States fully into the Saudi camp. Bundy's assistant, Robert Komer, expressed the dilemma: “It's one thing to defend Saudis against aggression. It's another to declare we choose the kings over the bulk of the Arab world; that would be the real way to lose our oil.”Footnote ³⁶ But the Baʿthist ascendance offered new possibilities. “In fact,” wrote Komer, “a nice behind-the-scenes competition between Iraq and UAR for Arab leadership is shaping up (with us playing both ends against the middle).”Footnote ³⁷

Hilsman's report for INR stated that the new regime faced a number of challenges, including jealousies among party leaders and a high potential for civil–military strife. Further, Iraqis had little respect for the Baʿth Party, regarding it as “a movement of harebrained school boys.” Yet, the report predicted, the regime could probably survive these challenges “and it should give Iraq a more effective administration than it has had for some years.” Moreover, “A principal feature of the Baʿth movement is that it stands for representative government, with a full panoply of constitution, elections, and party competition,” although he noted that this characteristic was likely to collide with the party's tendency toward conspiracy and its ties to military officers.Footnote ³⁸

While the February coup was still in progress, Chargé Melbourne reported:

A week later, Assistant Secretary of State Phillips Talbot wrote to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “We can expect . . . the Soviets and local Communists in Iraq to be held at arms length . . . and the pace of modernization and reform to be speeded.” He added:

Robert G. Neumann, a political scientist working in the office of Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, summarized the administration's view of the Baʿthists’ place in U.S. strategy: “The movement toward increasing Arab unity constituted a historical evolution that was probably irresistible. . . . Therefore Nasser and the UAR have received significant and growing support from the United States.” The United States had offset al-Nasir's regional sway by supporting King Husayn of Jordan and King Saʿud of Saudi Arabia. “However, it was recognized that these latter two regimes . . . represented historical anomalies and their survival over the long range future was in doubt. Therefore Nasser and the UAR have remained our main cards.” But given “the frequent non-compliance of Nasser with his commitments,” the Baʿth Party presented the United States with new opportunities. He noted that the party, which “is strongly anti-communist,” “constitutes a movement of authentic Arab nationalism and unity, but is distinguished from Nasser's approach by its advocacy of (a somewhat vaguely conceived) parliamentarism [sic] and opposition to one-man rule.” Because the Baʿthists were rivals to al-Nasir, U.S. support for them could counterbalance him “and yet register us as supporting ‘Arab unity.’”Footnote ⁴¹

After nearly seven months of Baʿthist rule, however, not all U.S. officials were so sanguine as they observed struggles between left- and right-wing factions of the regime and the military's resentment of civilian politicians. Andrew Killgore of the State Department's Iraq-Jordan desk wrote:

APPLYING COUNTERINSURGENCY POLICY

Policymakers in Washington came to view the Baʿthist regime as a candidate for the U.S. counterinsurgency program soon after the February coup. In March, the Defense Department tried to arrange an “orientation tour” for two counterinsurgency specialists to brief the Baghdad embassy staff.Footnote ⁴³ One of the specialists was George A. Carroll, the assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric on the Special Group (CI).Footnote ⁴⁴ Carroll was a former CIA officer who, under diplomatic cover in Tehran, had helped plan and execute the overthrow of Iranian Premier Mohammad Mossadegh ten years previously.Footnote ⁴⁵ The other specialist was Naval Captain Eric W. Pollard. He would receive a commendation the following year for his work with the Iranian government in developing its counterinsurgency capabilities.Footnote ⁴⁶ While serving as the U.S. naval attaché in Tehran, Pollard had also taken part in the 1953 coup in Iran, as had Melbourne in his former role as the Tehran embassy's top political officer.Footnote ⁴⁷ Robert Strong, in charge of the State Department's Iraq-Jordan desk, advised against Carroll and Pollard's visit to Baghdad, noting that it “could serve as grist in the mills” for rumors that the United States had been behind the February coup.Footnote ⁴⁸ Carroll and Pollard apparently did not conduct their orientation tour. But Gordon Mattison, the State Department's officer in charge of the interagency seminar on internal defense, called on the embassy sometime that spring to press the counterinsurgency program forward, and in May the Special Group (CI) added Iraq to its responsibilities, apparently in anticipation of the renewal of the Kurdish insurgency.Footnote ⁴⁹

U.S. practitioners of counterinsurgency were attracted to the Iraqi Baʿthist regime in part because it had assigned its militia, the National Guard, the task of imprisoning, interrogating, and executing communists and their suspected supporters, thus producing tensions in Iraqi–Soviet relations.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Guard, which initially included a sizable contingent of university students, had secretly drilled for its part in the February coup during the December 1962 students’ strike. When army units moved against Qasim, guardsmen identified by armbands and bearing various light weapons seized control of the streets of major Iraqi cities and manned checkpoints.Footnote ⁵¹

Soon after the February coup, the Iraqi Baʿth Party leadership established the Committee of Inquiry within the National Guard. The committee's mandate was to interrogate suspected communists, whom the guardsmen subjected to appalling abuse. The main committee was headquartered in Baghdad, and numerous other National Guard committees conducted interrogations throughout the country. Months after the November 1963 ouster of the civilian Baʿthists, ʿAbd al-Salam ʿArif's successor regime published an exposé of the National Guard's crimes, titled al-Munharifun min al-Haris al-Qawmi fi al-Madd al-Shuʿubi (The Deviationists among the National Guard in the Anti-Arab Nationalist Deluge). Along with grisly photos of corpses and torture devices, it reprinted government documents and citizens’ complaints depicting the Guard's misuse of government resources, theft of private property, extortion, murder, rape, and other disturbing acts of torture.Footnote ⁵² Many have since believed that the CIA directly aided the Baʿthist assault on the Iraqi communists, particularly because Jordan's King Husayn claimed this in a frequently cited interview with al-Nasir's publicist, Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal.Footnote ⁵³ Both Husayn and al-Nasir had their reasons at the time to discredit the Iraqi Baʿthists, however, and the claim should not be taken at face value.Footnote ⁵⁴

Whether Husayn's allegation was spurious or not, U.S. archival sources clearly document interaction between U.S. officials and the National Guard and demonstrate that the State Department was fully aware that the Iraqi government was detaining a high number of its citizens. The Baʿthist foreign minister, Talib Shabib, promised Melbourne in February that there would be no bloodbath perpetrated against the communists, explaining that “small fry members” would be required to sign legal statements and given a form of “parole,” while party leaders would be tried, evidently for treason rather than for simply being communists.Footnote ⁵⁵ Five weeks later, Shabib informed Melbourne that 14,000 Iraqis were in detention, of whom Shabib claimed 10,000 were members of the party or indirectly associated with it.Footnote ⁵⁶

The U.S. embassy staff had developed contacts with members of the National Guard even prior to the militia's February debut. Immediately after Qasim's overthrow, a U.S. embassy official reported to Rusk that “it [is] worth emphasizing importance of Baʿthi and nationalist dominated students strike as immediate contributor to overthrow of Qasim. [The] strike demonstrated Baʿthi organization [sic] effectiveness and relative communist weakness vis-à-vis Baʿthi and other nationalist elements.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The official's emphasis on the importance of the students’ strike is significant in light of a March 1964 State Department document that refers to “the Baathi student organization, which triggered the revolution of February 8, 1963 by sponsoring a successful student strike at the University of Baghdad and which our officers assiduously cultivated [emphasis added].” The document also notes that the Baghdad embassy “profited vicariously” from the fact that its “English teaching operation” (the American Institute of Languages) was highly regarded by its students, “many of whom turned out to be members of the Baath National Guard which had played an important role in Qassim's overthrow.”Footnote ⁵⁸

More significantly, U.S. embassy staff remained in direct contact with National Guard members, including interrogators, after the coup. First Secretary William Lakeland reported in April that he was in touch with a Baʿthist interrogator named Hazim Mushtaq, whom he described as “a nationalist intellectual with good revolutionary credentials.” Lakeland added that Mushtaq was teaching military psychology at the Iraqi military academy and philosophy at Baghdad University and that his brother, Basim, was a communist. Lakeland also claimed that communists who were compelled to confess on state television were rarely beaten but were deprived of sleep.Footnote ⁵⁹ By October, Lakeland was on intimate enough terms with the National Guard that some of its members informed him that the organization intended to achieve greater discipline and effectiveness by expelling non-Baʿthists from its ranks and by establishing a “secret service” within the Guard “to infiltrate anti-government groups and inform on them.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In Basra, U.S. Consul Charles W. Henebry got to know the local National Guard commander, twenty-five-year-old Fathi Husayn. The son of an Iranian shoemaker, he had graduated from Baghdad University, worked as an accountant, and served in the army as a lieutenant. After visiting Husayn in his dingy office, Henebry described him as jocular with his young guardsmen but presenting a “sober mien” once “he sent his henchmen away” and the “boy scout atmosphere cleared.” Henebry witnessed guardsmen bring in “one young unfortunate in pajamas,” whom Husayn “chewed out” and ordered to be taken away.Footnote ⁶¹

Fathi Husayn appears also in al-Munharifun, which reprints a 12 March note from the Basra army base commander to the chief of staff complaining of the Guard's “terrorist acts,” especially the role of “the commander of the National Guard, called ‘Fathi,’ who is of Iranian origin.” The base commander accused the Guard of “arbitrary arrests and searching private residences without court orders” as well as of ignoring civilian, police, and military authorities. His note adds, “The citizens’ complaints about the National Guard sexually assaulting girls in the Basra area have increased to a very regrettable level (especially within the committees of inquiry in this matter).”Footnote ⁶² The same volume reprints an official note of 18 June from a military intelligence officer in Basra to the commander of the city's army garrison warning that “all the people of the city of Basra are talking about the great scandal” of the sexual assault of two women detainees by members of the National Guard in the city. The officer requested that the commander “notify responsible authorities to put a stop to the illegal behavior and criminal acts by members of the National Guard—at the head of them the commander of the National Guard called ‘Fathi.’”Footnote ⁶³

U.S. embassy officials could not have been expected to know all that took place in the National Guard's detention centers. But less than two months after the demise of the Baʿthist government, Lakeland reported that the Baʿth Party had become the object of wide-scale revulsion among the Iraqi population for the barbarities that it committed. He acknowledged that “rumors” had reached the embassy staff “almost immediately after the [February] revolution,” but the diplomats were skeptical because of “the well-known Arab tendency to exaggerate,” because the rumors were spread by opponents of the Baʿthists, and because “no Embassy officer had spoken with any person who had been tortured himself, or even had personally known someone who had been tortured.” The situation changed after the fall of the Baʿthist government and the release of prisoners from jail:

Lakeland transmitted a string of accounts of torture: “Men were frequently stripped, their hands tied behind their backs and they were suspended from revolving overhead fans for hours or days. . . .” Some prisoners were drowned in a cesspool or in a flooded basement, others had body parts sawn off, and women were raped. Basim Mushtaq, according to his Baʿthist brother, “lost one eye, had his nails pulled out and had hot irons applied to his stomach,” and “one girl (Lena Matar) . . . was stripped and tied face to face with a naked decomposing corpse for twelve hours. She, at least temporarily, has lost her mind.”Footnote ⁶⁴

In Washington, Andrew Killgore became concerned because an organization called the Iraqi Students Society in the United States was circulating materials by mail that publicized the regime's human rights abuses and that had originated with the British Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Iraq, chaired by the Labour Party politician Robert Chorley. Rising to the regime's defense, Killgore notified the State Department's Office of Security that the materials likely included the names “of some prominent British personalities who would not be associated with such an organization.” Consequently, Killgore suggested, the Iraqi Students Society “might have improperly used the United States mail.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The State Department's INR informed Killgore that the materials were compiled for the Iraqi Students Society by one ʿAbd al-Jabbar ʿAlwan of Chicago, who was a supporter of Qasim and whose American wife was “suspected [of] membership in the communist party.”Footnote ⁶⁶ State Department files contain a letter by ʿAlwan to the United Nations offices alerting them to “a savage and concerted campaign [in Iraq] against citizens of all walk [sic] of life” and requesting a U.N. fact-finding mission. He claimed that reports by foreigners and Iraqis testified to “massive numbers imprisoned in jails and concentration camps, execution without trials, torture, dismissal from employment, and confiscation of property.” With the letter are a bulletin from Chorley's committee, activists’ statements of protest against the torture of women and children, press articles documenting Iraqi human rights abuses, and a letter to the U.N. from an Iraqi father that detailed the torture and murder of his son.Footnote ⁶⁷

It is difficult to know what relationship the Defense Department and the CIA developed with the National Guard, but the U.S. Covert Action Staff (CAS) was in contact with it by the final stage of the coup. This is evident from an embassy telegram of 12 February, which states that a “reliable CAS source [reported] 2400 communists rounded up and under detention in Baghdad.”Footnote ⁶⁸ CAS was also certainly sponsoring an operation in Iraq that was conducted by non-U.S. personnel. This is clear from the fact that the 1962 Overseas Internal Defense Policy defined covert action not as intelligence gathering but specifically as “operations which are so planned and executed as to conceal the identity of or permit plausible denial by the sponsor. They differ from clandestine operations in that emphasis is placed on concealment of identity of sponsor rather than concealment of the operation.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Furthermore, a Joint Chiefs of Staff report indicates that by August the JCS had classified the National Guard as one of Iraq's “indigenous counterinsurgency forces.” This suggests that the Guard might have become an instrument of U.S. counterinsurgency policy, although the report neither demonstrates much knowledge of the Guard's structure nor describes a program of support for it.Footnote ⁷⁰

In October, however, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor, sent a memorandum to the Special Group (CI) suggesting that “the existence and improper employment of paramilitary units, other than the armed forces, which have been developed with U.S. support” had recently provoked the army of Honduras to launch a coup against the country's civilian government. He therefore recommended a review of U.S. counterinsurgency programs in other countries “to determine whether similar potentially dangerous situations are fostered” and to compile a “critical list” of countries.Footnote ⁷¹ In response, an ad hoc review group composed of officials from State, Defense, and CIA produced a list of fourteen countries in which U.S.-supported paramilitaries might challenge the regular armed forces; Iraq was among them.Footnote ⁷² Although the available sources do not indicate whether the National Guard was a beneficiary of the U.S. program, U.S. support for another Iraqi paramilitary can be documented. This was the national police.

THE IRAQI POLICE FORCE IN U.S. COUNTERINSURGENCY POLICY

A program for training and advising foreign police forces had existed during the Eisenhower administration within the State Department's foreign aid agency, the International Cooperation Administration (ICA). The Kennedy administration, however, gave the program much more attention.Footnote ⁷³ An interdepartmental committee chaired by U. Alexis Johnson of the Special Group (CI) housed the program in the ICA's successor agency, the Agency for International Development (AID), and President Kennedy authorized the program, titled Office of Public Safety (OPS), in NSAM 177 of August 1962. Although NSAM 177 assigned AID oversight of OPS, the document preserved a clear role for the Defense Department.Footnote ⁷⁴ The CIA's involvement in the police program is more difficult to discern, but the CIA's deputy director at the time, Robert Amory Jr., later stated that the agency in 1961 had thirty-three employees in police programs in twelve countries. He recalled that the “brains” of the police program had been at the CIA, and in 1962, they were moved from the CIA to AID in the person of OPS director Byron Engle.Footnote ⁷⁵ In a 1962 memo to Bundy and Taylor, Komer mentioned “the [American] cops recruited by AID and CIA” and referred to police training and assistance as “the AID/CIA” program.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In late 1963, the administration opened the International Police Academy in Washington, D.C., to train foreign police officers.Footnote ⁷⁷ Its curriculum was intended to emphasize not only “hard indoctrination in the human relations-Anglo-Saxon concepts of enforcement” but also “the internal security, counter subversive and counter-insurgency aspects of foreign police operations.”Footnote ⁷⁸

In Iraq, the Kennedy administration was able to build on an initiative of the Eisenhower administration, which had established an ICA police training program there in 1957. Before Qasim ended the program in 1958, it had trained about fifty Iraqi police officers.Footnote ⁷⁹ Perhaps because Qasim's regime sought to offset Soviet influence, the program was modestly revived by 1961. About ten more Iraqi police officers received training in the U.S. that year. ICA airgrams to the Baghdad embassy indicate that at least two of those—officers Karaghuli and al-Rawi—were programmed for an eight-week course at International Police Services, Inc. (INPOLSE), an ostensibly private firm based in Washington, D.C.Footnote ⁸⁰ In 1976, the Congressional Special Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Otis Pike of New York, identified INPOLSE as a CIA proprietary company serving “the dual purpose of improving allies’ internal security, and evaluating foreign cadets for pro-U.S. orientation, which might later enable CIA to recruit them as intelligence assets.”Footnote ⁸¹ In 1962, the Iraqi government requested that at least two more trainees receive instruction in the United States “in intelligence, counter-subversion, and ancillary activities.”Footnote ⁸²

After Qasim's overthrow, an AID police specialist reported that the U.S.-trained police officers had “generally progressed well in the [police] organization” under the Baʿthist regime.Footnote ⁸³ This was an understatement. The new director general of police, General Ahmad Amin (Mahmud), had trained in the United States in 1961, doing internships with police departments in Chicago and Louisville.Footnote ⁸⁴Al-Munharifun indicates that he had been the director of police in Baghdad's Kazimiyya neighborhood prior to the 8 February coup, but his membership in the Baʿth Party opened the way to his appointment to Iraq's top police post afterwards.Footnote ⁸⁵ According to an interview he gave to the Baʿthist newspaper al-Jamahir in February 1963, Amin had been among the plotters against Qasim before being jailed by the regime, apparently in April 1962.Footnote ⁸⁶ Fadil al-Samarraʾi likewise trained in the United States in 1961, interning at police departments in Raleigh, Macon, Mobile, and Dallas. A police major before the coup, in 1963 he achieved the post of commander of the paramilitary Mobile Police and the rank of brigadier general because of his membership in the Baʿth Party.Footnote ⁸⁷ An unnamed third officer who had trained at Fort Bragg in 1961 became assistant director of the General Security Police with the ascent of the Baʿthists.Footnote ⁸⁸ In early July 1963, Amin and al-Samarraʾi asked embassy officials for U.S. training and equipment for the Iraqi national police force and for a U.S. specialist to come to Iraq to inspect its police administration. The requested advisor, Edward C. Kennelly, arrived in Baghdad on 19 August.Footnote ⁸⁹ As branch chief of the ICA's Public Safety Division in 1957, he had been responsible for overseeing the previous police program in Iraq.Footnote ⁹⁰ He knew several of the Iraqi police officials who met him on his arrival from their “[AID or ICA] participant training in the U.S.”Footnote ⁹¹

Amin's and al-Samarraʾi's request for more police to be trained in the United States was granted. Two Iraqi police majors, Sabih D. al-Samarraʾi and ʿAbd al-Mawjud ʿAbd al-Latif, were among the first graduating class of Washington's International Police Academy in February 1964.Footnote ⁹² The available sources do not reveal anything about al-Samarraʾi, but ʿAbd al-Latif evidently entered the International Police Academy with strong counterinsurgency credentials. He told a correspondent for al-Jamahir that he had been among the group of police officers, students at Iraq's police academy, and military officers who had plotted against Qasim's regime and had been jailed before its overthrow. Fellow policemen had sprung him from jail during the coup, and he participated in fierce fighting against communists in Baghdad's Kazimiyya neighborhood.Footnote ⁹³

THE INTERNAL DEFENSE PLAN FOR IRAQ

Eleven days before Kennelly's mission to the Iraqi police forces, the Special Group (CI) authorized the Baghdad embassy staff to prepare an internal defense plan for Iraq, as required by the OIDP.Footnote ⁹⁴ The plan was sent to Washington in November and on the fifteenth was scheduled for presentation at the group's 27 February 1964 meeting.Footnote ⁹⁵ Only four days before Special Group (CI)'s 15 November meeting, a group of Baʿthist civilians and military officers expelled a leftist faction from the Iraqi Baʿth Regional Congress. The National Guard took to the streets in protest. On 18 November President ʿArif ordered loyal military officers to have their units clear the Guard from the streets and to disarm it. The officers ejected the civilian Baʿthists from power, and by the day's end ʿArif and the military controlled the state. He pushed the remaining senior Baʿthist army officers from the government within the next few months.Footnote ⁹⁶

Because of the upheaval in Baghdad, the Special Group (CI) postponed the review of Iraq's Internal Defense Plan until the group's meeting of 6 March 1964, during which it approved the plan.Footnote ⁹⁷ In addition to recommending that U.S. agencies cultivate contacts with Iraqi youth and labor organizations, the plan advised that the small military assistance program be continued with a funding of up to $200,000 a year and that the United States “should be prepared upon the request of the Iraqi government to send [Special Forces] mobile training teams and civic action teams to Iraq, and once the Kurdish question is solved, consider counterinsurgency training for the Iraqi army.” Likewise, the United States should, if the Iraqi government requested, “assist in improving the Iraqi police and internal security forces, including more extensive training in the United States.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The Baʿthists had been important enough to American policy that their fall from power had necessitated the rewriting of the Internal Defense Plan that the Baghdad embassy had first submitted to the Special Group (CI). The State Department's director of regional programs for the Near East and South Asia, Guy A. Lee, noted a month after ʿArif's putsch, “As the plan was written prior to the most recent change of government, it is necessary to update and revise portions of the plan.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Lee wrote in 1965 also that a “plan was submitted in November [1963] but a coup required a revised plan, which was submitted in February 1964.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ An Iraqi businessman, who had met with ʿArif in the summer of 1964, related to Robert Strong, the U.S. ambassador since July 1963, “that Aref had felt that the U[nited] S[tates] G[overnment] had supported the Baathis, that the aid the USG had given the Baathi regime was much greater than that given since November 18, and that the USG was against [ʿArif's government].”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Strong himself revealed American expectations of the Baʿthists (and his own beliefs about Arabs) by expressing his disillusionment with them soon after the coup. He reported to Washington, “Evidence of personal ambition and indiscipline have demonstrated [that the] Baathis [are] still Arabs. [The] myth of monolithic structure has been destroyed.”Footnote ¹⁰²